Performance Art in a Digital Age: a live Conversation with Ricardo Dominguez
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| Performance Art in a Digital Age: A Live Conversation with Ricardo Dominguez
Thursday 25 November 1999, Institute of International Visual Arts, London. By Coco Fusco CF: How did Electronic Disturbance Theatre come about? RD: I will respond with a story from sub-comandante Marcos. Hola. Bienvenidos, hermanos y hermanas. Welcome sisters and brothers, I’m going to tell you a little story, una pequeña historia: Pedrito (a Tojolabal, two and a half years old, born during the first Intergalactic) is playing with a little car with no wheels or body. In fact, it appears to me that what Pedrito is playing with is a piece of that wood they call "cork", but he has told me very decisively that it is a little car and that it is going to Margaritas to pick up passengers. It is a gray and cold January morning and we are passing through this village which is today electing the delegates (one man and one woman) who will be sent to the March meeting. The village is in assembly when a Commander-type plane, blue and yellow, from the Army Rainbow Task Force and a pinto helicopter from the Mexican Air Force, begin a series of low over flights above the community. The assembly does not stop; instead those who are speaking merely raise their voices. Pedrito is fed up with having the artillery aircraft above him, and he goes, fiercely, in search of a stick inside his hut. Pedrito comes out of his house with a piece of wood, and he angrily declares that "I'm going to hit the airplane because it's bothering me a lot." I smile to myself at the child's ingenuousness. The plane makes a pass over Pedrito's hut, and he raises the stick and waves it furiously at the war plane. The plane then changes its course and leaves in the direction of its base. Pedrito says "There now" and starts playing once more with his piece of cork, pardon, with his little car. The Sea and I look at each other in silence. We slowly move towards the stick which Pedrito left behind, and we pick it up carefully. We analyze it in great detail. "It's a stick," I say. "It is," the Sea says. Without saying anything else, we take it with us. We run into Tacho as we're leaving. "And that?" he asks, pointing to Pedrito's stick which we had taken. "Mayan technology," the Sea responds. Trying to remember what Pedrito did I swing at the air with the stick. Suddenly the helicopter turned into a useless tin vulture, and the sky became golden and the clouds floated by like marzipan. Muchas gracias, I hope you enjoyed the story. This Mayan technology, this stick is a metaphor for what Electronic Disturbance Theatre has created as its performative matrix. The stick represents a third, or a fourth, or fifth alternative to the apocalyptic or utopian sense of the Internet. Those of us working in the virtual domain are constantly told to obey the utopian dream of the wired world where there will be no class, sex and no issues of identity. Alternatively we are fed the apocalyptic visions of viruses and Y2K. But, the Zapatistas, using this Mayan technology, advocate another type of gesture which I would say is related to magical realism. This realism involves having the knowledge of the dangers that doing such simple acts such as getting water or going to the next town in Chiapas (a space under the constant threat by the Mexican’s low-intensity tactics), and also, knowing that a story or a poetic gestures might be able to get you around danger – more so than carrying a M-16 with you – the Zapatistas use the politics of a magical realism that allows them to create these spaces of invention, intervention, and to allow the world wide networks to witness the struggle they face on daily. It was the acceptance of digital space by the Zapatistas in 12 days that created the very heart of this magical realism as information war. It was this extraordinary understanding of electronic culture which allowed the Zapatistas on 1 January, 1994, one minute after midnight just as (NAFTA) a Free Trade Agreement between Canada, U.S.A, and Mexico went into effect - to jump into the electronic fabric, so to speak, faster than the speed of light. Within minutes people around the world had received emails from the first declaration from the Lacandona Jungle. The ne xt day the autonomous Zapatista zones appeared all over the Internet. It was considered by the New York Times as the first post-modern revolution. The American intelligence community called it the first act of social net war. Remember, that this social net war was based on the simple use of e-mail and nothing more. Like Pedrito’s "stick" gestures can be very simple and yet create deep changes in the structures of the command and control societies that neo-liberalism agenda, like NAFTA, represent. But, back to your question. How did EDT come about? Digital Zapatismo is and has been one of the most politically effective uses of the Internet that we know of since January 1, 1994. Zapatistas have created a counter-distribution network of information with about 300 or more autonomous nodes of support. This has enabled the EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army) to speak to the world without having to pass through any dominant media filters. The Zapatistas use of communication on the Internet, e-mail and webpages, created a electronic force field around these communities in resistance. Which literally stopped a massive force of men and the latest Drug War technologies from annihilating the EZLN in a few days. The Zapatistas themselves really did not expect to live very long after January 1. When the communiqués signed by Subcommandante Marcos were distributed globally through the Net. They began to flow between pre-existing anti-NAFTA and other newly formed activist listservs, newsgroups, and personal Cc: lists, news, reports, analyses, announcements about demonstrations, and calls for intercontinental gatherings spread throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. By the summer of 94 we began to hear the Zapatistas use the terms "intercontinental networks of struggle" and "intercontinental networks of resistance." This movement of information through these various Zapatistas networks of resistance can be said to have occurred via a strange chaos moving horizontally, non-linearly, and over many sub-networks. Rather than operating through a central command structure in which information filters down from the top in a vertical and linear manner - the model of radio and television broadcasting - information about the Zapatistas on the Internet has moved laterally from node to node. The primary use of the Internet by the global pro-Zapatista movement has been as a communication tool. However particularly since the Acteal Massacre in Chiapas at the end of 1997 in which 45 indigenous people were killed, the Internet has increasingly been used not only as site or a channel for communication, but also as a site for direct action and electronic civil disobedience. Beta actions of electronic civil disobedience occurred early in 1998. Information about the Acteal Massacre, and announcements of Mexican consulate and embassy protests, was transmitted rapidly over the Net. The largest response was a street protest, drawing crowds of between 5,000 and 10,000 in places such as Spain and Italy. But there were also calls for actions in on-line communities. On the low end of digital activism people sent large amounts of email protest to selected email targets of the Mexican government. The Anonymous Digital Coalition, a group based in Italy, issued a plan for virtual sit-ins on five web sites of Mexico City financial corporations. They issued information about the time zones so people could act together when it was 10:00 a.m. in Mexico City. They instructed people to use their Internet browsers to repeatedly reload the web sites of these financial institutions. The idea was that repeated reloading of the web sites would block those web sites from so called legitimate use. This idea was the jump off point for the Zapatista FloodNet which automated the reload function to happen every 3 seconds. Which was created by the Electronic Disturbance Theater. The group is composed of myself and net artists, Carmin Karasic, Brett Stalbaum, and Stefan Wray, an activist and media scholar. CF: EDT’s actions are passed through an artist-driven server called The Thing. You have characterized this server as a form of social sculpture. RD: As a net performer I was interested in a matrix that would articulate social issues as well as performative issues with and within the parameters of code. I was interested in the possibility of agit -prop theatre on-line. But I needed to have an infrastructure to stage and create virtual performances. In the early 1990s artists did not have access to network technology as readily as we do at the end of the nineties. I was in Tallahassee, Florida, during the 80’s where I was a member of Critical Art Ensemble (The group that developed the idea of Electronic Civil Disobedience), and I heard that in New York there were artists who
CF: Can you explain a little bit about how you conceive of EDT work as performance? RD: Augusto Boal, who theorized and performed what he calls "invisible theater" once argued that middle class theater was able to produce complete images of the world because it existed within a totalized social mirror of production. Other sectors of society that wanted to create a different kind of reflection could only produce incomplete performances that pointed towards something beyond what already exists. There is a history of the theater of this type of critical social performance; the theater of Erwin Piscator who just read newspapers on the street or recreated the stories on the streets for people passing by; Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theater, the Living Theater, and Teatro Campesino working with Cesar Chavez, etc. Each of these groups created gestures that worked to literally implode every-day street realities, new theatrical modes of presentation and direct political manifestation. These type of agit-prop groups pointed to the possibility of new forms of the performative matrix that could be translated onto the digital stage. That the techniques to create social drama or civil drama could be once again developed in this new space. More recent groups such as Gran Fury created what the government called riots. Nonetheless, they used very stylized type of gestures and by developing a particular look, color of clothing, T-shirts, gestures, like Die Ins, they created a new type of direct action theater on the street. This is a history of performance that EDT continues. What I am interested in are practices that break with traditional performance art or traditional theater, and that more importantly, reflect a critique and discontent by a community. Now, activist, direct action performers, or more traditional forms of agit-prop theater, can chose to use the spectacle of collective action that is visible such a street action, or they can chose to be invisible performances of digital gestures, such as the uploading the names of the victims of the Acteal massacre into Mexican government or Pentagon servers. CF: I wouldn't call your Acteal action invisible, I would just call it abstract. This is perhaps the biggest conceptual leap a viewer of your work must make, if that viewer is conditioned by the conventional of theatre from the flesh world. The performance language EDT uses doesn't look like live theatre because it's not mimetic. We expect to see a play unfold before our eyes. Even most experiments with Internet theatre involving avatars attempt at some level to reproduce the visual codes of theatre, cinema and television while the role of the director and the actors gets splintered and distributed among the participants. But, as you walk me through a FloodNet Action - all I’m seeing as a record of mass activities is are lines at the bottom of the screen. The moving lines to me resemble the cyphers of audio editing programs that visualize the length and depth of sound. What the lines in fact are is a record of virtual presence with actual repercussions. I’d like to consider your work with EDT in relationship to a specifically Latin America genealogy. There are several examples of performance art from the 1970s and '80s that was designed to take place in the street to reappropriate public space during political periods of extreme repression. I am thinking here of the emergence of the Chilean avanzada during the Pinochet dictatorship, and the street actions of carried out by several collectives; the Grupos in Mexico during the same period that involved performances in public places and that formed a delayed response to the massacre of Tlatelolco, and work by The Border Art Workshop/El Taller de Arte Fronterizo. In a sense, the objective of that work was to point to the absence of civic life, to force awareness of that absence into the open to engender a dialogue about how public life had been eviscerated by political power. Can you talk about how you transposed that dynamic into the domain of the virtual with EDT? RD: Well we do it through a simple gesture. The public space of electronic culture as it exists now is through browsers, such as Netscape or Internet Explorer. An intrinsic component of each of those public spaces or browsers is the 'reload' button. This reload button allows individuals online to make sure that the information they're getting on their web page is the latest information. EDT sees the browser as the public base of the virtual community. It is the space where communities gather, either to chat, to exchange information or to put up representations of their cares or concerns or, in the case of e-commerce, what they're trying to sell you. What EDT has done is to create an Applet. Brett Stalbaum, one of the members, took this public function and just added another element. Instead of the user hitting the reload button, the system automatically turns and refreshes itself the more people come to the site. The more people enter the Zapatista Floodnet the faster that refresh or reload button calls on the information the resides on the government servers on which the Sit-In is taking place over and over. Each person who joins adds to the speed and number of request for information from the targeted server. Through this means EDT creates a mass representation of the community. This representation constitutes a disturbance on the site. The more hits there are to President Zedillo’s web site, the more our presence is felt, and the less functional the government site becomes, until it is eventually overwhelmed by the public. This disturbance points to the nature of what public space means and who is allowed to be present in the public space of the Internet. Our simple gesture is quite simple. What happens when you enter EDT’s Virtual Sit-in: we request that you disable your Java script program. We have asked people to disable their Javascript programs because we have had long term Javascript wars with the Mexican government, in which they have tried to counter our Javascript by attacking it. Javascript is a type of object-oriented programming language, developed from the Java programming language, that is used in web browsers to control the processing of forms and other special functions. Javascript was devised by Netscape, and first appeared in its basic form (Javascript 1.0) in their Netscape Navigator 2 browser. Because of its versatility, it was soon adopted by Microsoft in their Internet Explorer 3 browser. The evolution of Javascript has had to keep pace with the increasing demands for greater versatility in page design. In 1997, the various models of the language were standardized, which led to the release of Javascript 1.2. There have always been compatibility problems between Netscape and Microsoft versions of Javascript, and this can be a problem if one tries to generate broad-based actions over the Internet. The issue however is not so much the detail of the language itself – what counts is how the incorporation of a programming language into web browsers affects the ability of the web to be used as a campaign tool. CF: How then does this relate to a Floodnet Swarm action? RD: FloodNet performs automatic reloads of the site in the background, slowing or halting access to the targeted server. FloodNet also encourages interaction on the part of individual protesters. Net surfers may voice their political concerns on a targeted server via the "personal message" form which sends the surfer's own statement to the server error log. Additionally, a mouse click on the applet image (containing a representation of the targeted site), sends a predefined message to the server error log. The Zapatista FloodNet system advises you that your IP will be harvested by the government during any FloodNet action. When you click and enter FloodNet, your name and political position will be made known to the authorities. This is similar to having your picture taken during a protest action on the street. There could be possible damage to your machine that may occur because of your participation in FloodNet action, just as in a street action the police may come to hurt you. But during the past FloodNet actions only two individuals have reported their machines crashing out of 80,000-plus that have participated, and the only time this happened was when the Department of Defense, the Pentagon attacked us on September 9th, 1998. The FloodNet also clogs bandwidth, it may make it difficult for individuals using small pipelines around the world to get information. FloodNet does not impact the targeted web sites specifically, as much as it disrupts the traffic going to the targeted web site. Something similar happens on the street, when individuals find themselves unable to get to work or buy a newspaper because of an action out on the bridge. Once you enter FloodNet you see that targeted URL on the bottom three frames. You begin to see President Zedillo's web site reloading, every 3 to 7 seconds on three different frames. The more people come, the faster it reloads. This creates a disturbance, a symbolic gesture that is non-violent. It doesn't break a server necessarily since many such as the Pentagon are quite robust and expect millions of hits. But FloodNet does create a sense of solidarity, what I would call 'community of drama' or a community joined by the magic stick. It also creates a mirror, that brings real criminal acts into view. This magical stick calls forth the most aggressive tendencies of the information war community. Take for example the Department of Defense. They attacked us during the September 9th, 1998 VR Sit-In that we did during the Ars Electronica Festival, in Linz, Austria – the DOD used a counter-hostile Java applet against FloodNet, which is the first offensive use of information war by a government against a civilian server that we know of. We believe we should be protected from such actions, that the government cannot attack civilians using any kind of software or hardware. What has become apparent is the kind of violence that these information war systems are now implementing against civilians to control whatever public space there is. CF: How does Swarm work? I'm particularly interested in how the Internet gestures end up on screen as a kind of abstract performance language. RD: We're just dealing with a browser. In fact, the gesture of reloading itself, as performance, doesn’t really matter much. The real drama and the real space of performance comes before and after the action, and follows the structure of a three act play. In the first act you announce what is going to happen. The middle act is the actual action itself. The last act is a gathering of dialogue about what happened – this is where the most instructive drama occurs. A social drama among different communities – net activist, net artist, and net hackers. The dot coms and government sites and also play their parts in this social drama. The FloodNet gesture allows the social flow of command and control to be seen directly – the communities themselves can see the flow of power in a highly transparent manner. During the last act of every action we did, we would see the endless flow of words come. I would receive e-mail not only from EDT members, but from people around the world saying I am participating - what exactly is happening or happened, what is going on in Chiapas. The e-mail came from around the world. A woman from South Korea, an Aborigine from Australia - and we began to create a network for a social drama because they're interested on what is the response would be, what is going on, how can we help etc. A virtual plaza, a digital situation, is thus generated in which we all gather and have an encounter, or an Encuentro, as the Zapatistas would say – about the nature of neo-liberalism in the real world and in cyberspace. CF: Can you explain the meaning of the visual signs that appear on screen during a Floodnet action? RD: While Floodnet action goes on, EDT not only recalls President Zedillo's web page, but we also call internal searches. For example, we will ask for the names of the dead, or about the question of human rights in Mexico. We ask the server the question, "Does human rights exist on President Zedillo's web site?" And then a 404 file emerges backstage, if you will. CF: What is a 404? RD: 404 files are the reports of this mistake or gap or the missing
CF: Is Ana Hernandez someone who was killed by the Mexican army? RD: Yes, she was killed in the Acteal Massacre on December 22, 1997. We
CF: What you are doing makes me think of Rachel Whiteread’s casting negative spaces. In a sense you are operating within a virtual domain, and are pointing to the absence of information, which amounts to an absence of concern for ethical issues and lives. RD: Yes, we bear witness to this with a gesture that retraces a Latin American performance tradition. We are bearing witness to the gap or to the invisibility that has been caused by the engines of destruction. CF: When you theorize EDT's practice you often mention connections with Ancient Greek concepts of the Agora and Demos. How do you envision virtual performance as a kind of metaphorical speech in light of this genealogy? RD: The idea of a virtual republic in Western Civilization can be traced back to Plato, and is connected to the functions of public space. The Republic incorporated the central concept of the Agora. The Agora was the area for those who were entitled to engage in rational discourse of Logos, and to articulate social policy as the Law, and thus contribute to the evolution of Athenian democracy. Of course those who did speak were, for the most part, male, slave-owning and ship owning merchants, those that represented the base of Athenian power. We can call them Dromos: those that belong the societies of speed. Speed and the Virtual Republic are the primary nodes of Athenian democracy – not much different than today. The Agora was constantly being disturbed by Demos, what we would call those who demonstrate or who move into the Agora and make gestures. Later on, with the rise of Catholicism – Demos would be transposed into Demons, those representatives of the lower depths. Demos did not necessarily use the rational speech of the Agora, they did not have access to it; instead, they used symbolic speech or a somatic poesis - Nomos. In the Agora, rational speech is known as Logos. The Demos gesture is Nomos, the metaphorical language that points to invisibility, that points to the gaps in the Agora. The Agora is thus disturbed; the rational processes of its codes are disrupted, the power of speed was blocked. EDT alludes to this history of Demos as it intervenes with Nomos. The Zapatista FloodNet injects bodies as Nomos into digital space, a critical mass of gestures as blockage. What we also add to the equation is the power of speed is now leveraged by Demos via the networks. Thus Demos_qua_Dromos create the space for a new type of social drama to take place. Remember in Ancient Greece, those who were in power and who had slaves and commerce, were the ones who had the fastest ships. EDT utilizes these elements to create drama and movement by empowering contemporary groups of Demos with the speed of Dromos – without asking societies of command and control for the right to do so. We enter the Agora with the metaphorical gestures of Nomos and squat on high speed lanes of the new Virtual Republic – this creates a digital platform or situation for a techno-political drama that reflects the real condition of the world beyond code. This disturbs the Virtual Republic that is accustomed to the properties of Logos, the ownership of property, copyright, and all the different strategies in which they are attempting enclosure of the Internet. CF: What are some of the responses that EDT has received from the US military and also from the Mexican government? RD: These confrontations began when EDT undertook its Swarm performance in Linz, Austria at Ars Electronica. On Tuesday September 9th, 1998 we started to do the largest virtual sit-in that we had ever done on Mexican President Zedillo's web site, the Pentagon and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. That morning I received a call from someone who I assumed to be representing the Mexican government who spoke Spanish with a Mexican accent. He said "Is this Ricardo Dominguez? " I said, "Yes." He said, "We know who you are, we know where you're at, we know where your family is, we are watching you, do not go downstairs, do not do your performance, because you know what the situation is, this is not a game," and then he hung up. I went down and we did the action anyway, but about three hours later we were attacked. We didn't know who it was. Hackers had told us the night before that they would attack us so we thought it might be them. Managers of President Zedillo’s website had tried to hack us before, so we thought it might be them. Then we received an e-mail message from www.wired.com, an important on-line news portal, saying that it was the Department of Defence that had initiated a counter-measure or a hostile Javascript Applet against the Zapatista Floodnet. As a result, the coverage of EDT’s activities by major news media exploded. An article about us appeared on the front page of The New York Times, (Hacktivists' of All Persuasions Take Their Struggle to the Web by Amy Harmon, October 31, 1998). The U.S. military commented in a knee-jerk manner, 'Well we don't know if what EDT is doing is illegal, but it certainly is immoral." From that point on we have been in dialogue with the military, which is very strange for us. I certainly didn't expect it, neither did any other members of EDT. The military invited us to do what we call "The National Security Agency Performance" for some 300 Generals and military men and also NSA people as well as Congressmen. On September 9, 1999, we did an hour and a half performance for them. We approached it as theatre. They interrogated us. Of course they wanted to know who was in charge, how extreme could we possibly get, what was the future like, what do we expect from the growth of this new term 'hacktivism' which has emerged as a response to the drama, if you will. The dialogue with the military continues. Recently I met with naval intelligence people who showed me their large holographic simulation war machines. So the Electronic Disturbance Theatre’s performance, even though I keep thinking that it's going to end, always seems to be spiraling to a new level. I’ve been asked if I'm concerned that I'm speaking to the military, and why I don’t worry about what they're attempting to do to us, either by co-opting or gathering information about us. One of the things about us is that, unlike hackers, EDT is very transparent. We use our names, people know who we are and what we do and we always let people know, and this really disturbs the military. They are modernist at heart; they want secrets, they want encryption, they want cyber-terrorists, and they want cyber-crime. What we give them is net art performance that allows everyone to see who the real cyber-terrorists are. CF: EDT also distributes the codes freely, right? RD: Yes, on January 1st, 1999, one minute after midnight, in celebration of
CF: Does EDT ever coordinate its virtual actions with more traditional forms of mobilization and protest? RD: When EDT began the Swarm performance, we tried to theorize a hybrid action. We wanted to mobilize people online as well as having direct representation on the ground in the streets. For the upcoming World Trade Organization protests we're developing different platforms. We're also working with Freespeech.org and Paper Tiger Television, and the new independent media groups to send out real streams representing the activities of the communities of direct action on the ground, so that individuals in Seattle and outside the city can have information about what is going on that has not been filtered through the mainstream media. We're going to set up maps of Seattle so that people can use their Palm Pilots to see what routes are being blocked by the police. We can also do counter-surveillance. Download 36.13 Kb. Share with your friends:
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